Not connected to Google's signals at all, but Yandex can be a good alternative source of data when looking into this. Yandex Webmaster has some decent tools and site diagnostic info. They outright show you which pages they don't want to index because of low quality issues. You may or may not agree with their automated assessments, but it can turn up interesting results that raise new questions and prompt further investigation.

In addition to the web interface, I suspect mobile has a huge influence on where Google is eventually trying to go with the Knowledge Graph. Google Now is already fairly impressive, and Voice Search has improved significantly. Future versions of Google Now (and the Knowledge Graph) are likely to be broader, faster and more accurate. As much as possible for factual queries, they're going to want people to ask Google Now a conversational question, and then provide the answer instantly (spoken). No typing, no refining queries, no scanning SERPs, no reading, no clicking, just question -- answer.

Google apparently applied to control 101 TLDs themselves, the first of which went into sunrise this week (.みんな). Their domain registry division for handling rollout of the approved new TLDs is Charleston Road Registry.

Some good suggestions here. Mention.net is another decent service for monitoring brand mentions. To expand on your third point, in addition to brand mentions it can be helpful to monitor other related exact strings like phone numbers and street addresses, these can sometimes return useful citations/opportunities. Regarding leadership team and employees (particularly writers/bloggers), you also can run OSE against their twitter profile URLs to find more potential opportunities.

Interesting analysis, the spike in weekend sharing is surprising. Just curious if the average Facebook user in this case is assumed to be American? Otherwise tens of millions of global ESL users could potentially be skewing the reading level, language complexity and sharing stats down.

Thanks, very true that popularity does not necessarily equal influence, and there are numerous ways of gauging authority. What exact weight this will have in the algorithm is an interesting question, but at least now we know it's here to stay.

These are all excellent. Another easy check to run every now and then is a linkfromdomain: through Bing with some spammy keywords as Rand illustrated last year. This can turn up some interesting results and things to fix.

Maybe not quite the same as clients, but there are categories of propective ones that are always fun to weed out:

Client: "I like what I've heard so far, you come well recommended, and I understand how important this is for our business. We should be able to have all this SEO stuff wrapped up by Friday for $200 right?"

I think you're right about the ivory tower issue. People aren't interested in following most celebrity and/or corporate accounts because they just don't feel real. They are often obviously run by staffers and don't offer any sense of genuine connection to the person who holds the appeal of following.

Lurker crew signing in. Just from brief conversations at conferences, I've met quite a few members who are very regular readers here that rarely or never comment. People have different motivations for commenting. Certainly a number of individuals have successfully leveraged the comments here to get noticed and help build a name in the industry. Others may choose to keep their information to themselves, or only comment when they feel they have something particularly relevant or valuable to contribute.

As far as changes go, all sites with an editorial and user component will change over time. The industry has changed a fair amount in 3 years and so has this site. Before V2 was V1, and before that Jon Stewart was answering questions on SEOChat. Now this site has multiple contributors, thousands of members and is a successful industry hub. As the site evolves, people will come and go, but as long as the content quality remains, most will choose to stay and there's no reason it won't continue to grow.

This same technique can work well for soliciting testimonials, comments and product reviews too.

Also, if you have a loyal customer base, consider dropping a short explanation about linking to your site or to their favourite product on your site in your FAQ section under a 'How Can I Help' or something along those lines. You may have some customers eager to help promote your business and it's easy to outline this kind of information for them.

I like this method as well. In addition to the tracking benefits, assigning specific lines to the web also creates a certain tangibility that can be great for some clients or management who can now directly see/hear those lines and get a better sense of the productivity of the website on a daily basis. Separate phone lines have a way of making the end results of search marketing campaigns seem more palpable.

This is exactly it. People new to the industry may try to build something themselves or they've had a good friend who 'knows this stuff' involved. After lots of effort and/or money getting a new site up, the last thing they want to hear from a search marketer is that unfortunately they've done it all wrong. These types of clients won't come around until they themselves are better educated on the subject, and some simply aren't going to do the work involved in that.

This is one major problem with acceditation in that just because someone is qualified to consult doesn't mean all clients out there actually want to hear the truth about their situation, so they may choose to seek out answers more in line with what they want to hear.

Based on the informal room polling, 'who's already using service/site xyz?' it seemed that the majority of attendees were already well into the world of social media, and while the overviews were good, I think plenty of people were really looking for more ways to maximize and improve upon their existing efforts.

Following up from earlier discussions, the endorsement of this type of use of the nofollow link attribute again seems expand its definition and be contradictory.

Matt: … sculpt where you want your PageRank to flow, or where you want Googlebot to spend more time and attention

vs.

Make pages for users, not for search engines. (Quality Guidelines)

I realize Matt means the use of all available tools, which is obviously good advice and can potentially help webmasters with their indexing and rankings.

Matt: … maybe you have a login page … that provides very little content value, so you could NoIndex that page.

This seems like an excellent example of PageRank sculpting, but when it comes more specifically to the use of the nofollow links, what small percentage of webmasters know about nofollow? What smaller percentage understands that this type of sculpting is considered acceptable practice?

Eric: … take pages like their about us page, and their contact us page, and link to them from the Homepage with a NoFollow attribute, and then link to them using NoFollow from every other page. It's just a way of lowering the amount of link juice they get. These types of pages are usually the highest PageRank pages on the site, and they are not doing anything for you in terms of search traffic.

Matt: Absolutely. So, we really conceive of NoFollow as a pretty general mechanism.

Yes doing this is optional, and while I recognize the potential SEO benefits in sculpting PageRank using the nofollow link method, why should webmasters be looking to 'sacrifice' their About Us and Contact pages as pages not worth properly linking to on their own sites? They're important pages on my sites. Turning down/off the juice to these pages to boost other pages seems like classic manipulation for search engines, not making changes to benefit users.

I was another one who showed up not knowing anybody going in. I would say right out of the gate going to the Microsoft party was a little different, as there were so many people I recognized and regularly read but nobody I knew. The SEOmoz party was definitely a good one to attend though, I think I met nearly as many people there as I did at the conference.

I had a client site that had a minor problem with some duplicate http/https pages. Google doesn't seem to have a problem indexing https pages if they're linked to. That doesn't necessarily mean they'll choose to show that one over an identical http version but it's something to consider.

I do agree that their relevancy has improved but must also admit a small degree of annoyance at seeing 4 sponsor results on some commercial searches. On machines set to 1024x768, these take up half of the left side of screen and only leave slightly less than two organic results showing above the fold.

I agree that any ads with audio are very intrusive. I think those smilie ads that blast "Oh My God ... No Way!!" after an accidental mouse-over are among the worst. From a user-experience perspective, those ads are one easy way to both startle me and make me never want to come back.

I took a very similar trip in February/March, it was great. The only place finding a connection wasn't easy was Venice, and the internet cafes there were the most expensive. Plenty to see within a short distance of the area you're staying including Piazza San Marco & the Guggenheim Collection.

I do find Canadian businesses naturally tend to focus on local markets, but many can successfully adapt to become national and international players.
Canada will always have strong economic ties to the US, and many markets both online and offline overlap. Canadian etailers can do well targeting the US market, or going after both the US and Canadian markets. There's always external factors to consider that can wreak havoc with business models, particularly the recent currency issues; either a windfall or a curse depending on your model.
Pharmaceuticals played a large role as a driving force developing ecommerce in Canada and really opened a lot of people's eyes, especially in Manitoba where thousands of jobs were created and millions of dollars made building the online pharmacy industry. There are many in the business community here well aware of the power of doing business online, both internationally and in relatively untapped local niches.

One of my ecomm sites (a .ca hosted in Canada) targets both US & Canadian customers. I had been seeing varying front page results for terms in both countries.
Now this week I'm seeing similar (slightly better) results in the US SERPs but many #1s across the board in the Canadian SERPs, including phrases that weren't being actively pursued.